This is our semi-annual major photography outing. Specially thanks to Henry Wong to plan this trip and Steve Kossack’s DVD.
The Death Valley trip began an early Friday (3/23/2007) morning flight to Las Vegas. I took the 7:15am UA flight to meet the guys in Vegas. After we got our rental car then we headed to eat dim sum for our first meal. We ate some awful dim sum and got our water for our trip in Ranch 99.
We made our way to Death Valley from LV (I slept most in that 2 hrs drive). Death Valley is different from what I expect in article, TV, or my though because the word "Death". It reminds me of Grand Canyon. After we check-in the Inn in Stovepipe Wells, we rested a little and started to head to Racetrack for sunset photos. We finally made it out to Racetrack Playa after a 2.5 hrs rough drive. We were off road most of the time and it was a fun driving. We finally got there and lucky it was not sunset yet so we had some time to explore the site. The hugeness and the flatness of the playa are breath taking. The most interesting thing in Racetrack is rocks slide across the ground, and it’s the wind blowing through the canyon that makes them move. You can tell it moved by the mud track trails behind some rocks. We had fun and we had dust all over ourselves. We headed by to the Inn by 9:30pm and all the restaurant were closed in Death Valley, therefore no dinner for Friday night, just beers.
We woke up at 4:30am and get ready to our sunrise destination Bad Water. Bad Water is the lowest point in North America being 282 feet below sea level. Temperatures in here can range from up to 130 degree in the summer to below freezing at night in the winter. The evaporated water leaves a dry and interesting salt formation on the ground. We took a lot of pictures in here until the sun was get too bright for good pictures.
We left around 8am and move on to our next photo spot “Devils Golf Course”. The towering columns of salt stretch for what seem like miles in this devil’s golf course. I carefully walked around and took some photos on these interesting strange rock hard formations from the ground. It was getting hot about 80 degree and I was hungry so I ask the folks to leave and get some lunch. We ate lunch buffet in Furnace Creek Ranch then headed back to Inn to get some rest.
The next photo spot is Sand Dune. We hike about 40 minutes under the hot sun and created our own trail along the hike. The dunes are most photogenic area in Death Valley so it was worth all the hard work and sweat. By the time we finish it was already dark. We hiked back to our car under moonlight. It could be very romantic if I was not with a bunch of dudes. We did a lot on this Saturday, it was somewhat painful but it was fun and good experience meeting the Death.
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